NEW YORK (Money Magazine) - Bargain hunting in the real world can be time-consuming and usually involves putting on pants and leaving the house.
On the Web it's oh-so-easy: Price comparison sites like BizRate, Dealtime, Pricegrabber and MySimon promise to find you the lowest prices available online on everything from DVD players to underwear.
They also offer ratings of the various merchants doing the selling -- which can be even more useful than seeing who's got the lowest price.
While all these sites can help you find good bargains, often from merchants you might not otherwise have considered, you'd do best to try several of them and bookmark two or three favorites, since you may need to search more than one site to nail the best deal.
Toggling helps - My two favorites are BizRate and Dealtime -- the former because of its detailed, objective store data, the latter because it delivers useful results quickly.
While other price comparison sites rank merchants based on a relative handful of customer reviews, BizRate requires a store to be reviewed by more than 20 customers before it even bestows a rating -- and many of the more popular sites boast thousands or even tens of thousands of customer reviews.
| Sites for savvy shoppers
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But BizRate can be clunky to use, and you may find yourself overwhelmed by data. When I recently did a search for "CD storage," BizRate delivered up more than 1,000 hits in a bewildering array of categories, including several in "Other Mens Exercise Clothes." (Who are these "other men," and what are they doing with CDs stuffed in their gym shorts?)
Dealtime, by contrast, helped me refine my search with minimal fuss and found me a good deal on shelving from a reputable merchant -- pronto. That's why Dealtime is the site I hit first, checking back with BizRate to make absolutely sure the seller is legit.
Kickbacks are nice - Ebates and Fatwallet take bargain hunting a step further, kicking back to you the money they get for referring you to an assortment of e-tailers.
Each site offers hundreds of Web retailers big and small to choose from, from obscure sites like Hobbytron and Kiss My Face to famous names like Buy.com and Gap.com. While some sites offer only small rebates -- a percentage point or two -- and others, like Amazon, offer none, the money can add up quickly if you do a lot of shopping at sites that offer decent-size givebacks, like Drugstore.com or 1-800-FLOWERS (both of which rebate 6 percent or more).
Call it trickle-back-to-you economics.
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